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A Writing Class Focused on Goodbyes

Simon Critchley, a philosophy professor at the New School, taught a class billed as a “Suicide Note Writing Workshop."Credit Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

“The suicide note — and I’m being deadly earnest — is moving, strange, harrowing and peculiar literature,” said Simon Critchley, an author and philosophy professor at the New School. “People’s interest in them is almost pornographic.”

Mr. Critchley was teaching a class billed as a “Suicide Note Writing Workshop,” part of a monthlong series of performances, installations and lectures called the School of Death and sponsored by Cabinet Magazine and the Family Business exhibition space on West 21st Street. The glass doors to his storefront classroom were flung open to the chilly rain falling outside, inviting passers-by to stop, listen, and sometimes contribute to the discussion.

The pop-up school came about as a smart-alecky reaction to a program in London called the School of Life, which Mr. Critchley described as “a particularly nauseating philosophy of self-help.”

“It’s also a way of mocking creative-writing workshops,” Mr. Critchley, 53, said. “We’re not mocking suicide. We’re doing this as a way to understand it. And why not be a little insensitive? People are terrified in talking about death.”
With Mr. Critchley kneeling before a blackboard on Saturday and his 15 attendees gathered tightly around, class began with a discussion of the shifting ethics of suicide, from antiquity to modern-day Christianity to right-to-die debates in the news media.

The suicide note, which he identified as a literary genre with a unique form, is a fairly recent invention coinciding with the rise of literacy and the press, he told the class.

“In antiquity, there was no need to leave a note,” he said. “It would have been obvious why you killed yourself.”

A student raised her hand to share a note she brought, a personal favorite found in an anthology.

“Dear Betty, I hate you. Love, George,” she read. The class laughed but quickly began talking about the dichotomies in the letter — love and hate, humor and anger — and then moved on to the larger question of the purpose of a suicide note.

Nadja Argyropoulou, curator at Family Business, shared one of the afternoon’s more stark compositions, written by a classmate.

“I am so filled with love it is still all too much to bear,” the note read. “I cannot find my way. The world is all wrong and although I withstood the worst of it, I lost out.”

Andrew Riddles, 44, a Web developer visiting from Canada, read from a classmate’s note: “Offstage was always best.” He found tenderness in the experience of attending the workshop. “It’s very embracing of life, the opposite of what you’d expect,” he said.

The second half of the afternoon format focused on epitaph writing, led by Jeff Dolven, an English professor at Princeton University, who called the epitaph a “very different genre” from the suicide note. The students wrote their own epitaphs. Some were stoic, some self-aggrandizing, some humorous.

“An imprint light,/Or deeply pressed/She moved among us/Then she left,” wrote Karen Houppert, a journalist.

“He was kind to all animals, except his family,” Mr. Riddles wrote.

As evening approached Mr. Dolven dismissed class and left the students with a final epitaph from W.B. Yeats.

“Cast a cold eye/On life, on death./Horseman, pass by,” he read, and a chilly quiet permeated the room.

“I’ll leave you with that enigmatic epitaph,” Professor Dolven said. “Reconcilable, though not perfectly reconcilable.”

Correction: May 20, 2013
An earlier version of this post misidentified the author of a note read aloud by Andrew Riddles and misquoted the note. The note was written by a classmate, not by Mr. Riddles, and it read “Offstage was always best,” not “Offstage is always best.” The post also misidentified the author of a note read aloud by Nadja Argyropoulou. It was written by a classmate, not by Ms. Argyropoulou.

A version of this article appears in print on 05/20/2013, on page A16 of the NewYork edition with the headline: A Writing Class Focuses on Goodbyes.

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